Late afternoon wind drones through decaying
slats of Occident Flour mill, around storefronts
and doors of shuttered businesses.

Discontented with stillness, gusts suddenly
kick deadfall leaves into autumn air so many
hope the year’s late crops won’t freeze in.

Where the town spreads its grid, some have lived
half a century in the same rooms. They swear
weather is the only news worth their time.

In a trailer on Division Street, a discharged
soldier lies awake, listening hard to the war
she just left, dope a minefield in her veins.

On this endless blacktop, your mind has too much
time to kill. Recalling how slowly worlds rust,
you strain at some faraway thing your last lover said.

Gathering again, wind insists on an audience —
shaking the fractured windshield and rusted hinges
of an ancient Ford parked beside the mill.

A Burlington Northern follows the rails into vanishing.
Unhurried, it melds to a geography of departure,
like someone breathing late in the dark.

Jeffrey Alfier is founder and co-editor of Blue Horse Press and San Pedro River Review. He won the 2014 Kithara Book Prize for his poetry collection, Idyll for a Vanishing River. His latest book is Southbound Express to Bayhead.

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Border Crossing is an annual literary and arts journal published online by the Lake Superior State University Creative Writing Program. Uniquely situated on the border of America and Canada, we're committed to publishing the best work submitted by emerging and established writers on both sides of the border, as well as to supporting the literary arts in the Midwest and Ontario. We're especially interested in writing that crosses boundaries in genre or geography, and voices that aren't often heard in mainstream publications. The best way to see what we mean by this is to read our latest issue. Learn more at bcrossing.org/about-us/.